James: James Schramko here. Today’s guest is a Facebook expert who’s been helping me with some innovations on my own Facebook page and has largely responsible for the change in direction for my fan page recently. Welcome to the call, Victoria Gibson.

Victoria: Hi James!

James: How are you?

Victoria: I’m well, thanks for having me.

James: Victoria, what I thought would be interesting for our listeners is little bit of an update on Facebook. We’ve had some very popular episodes with our other good friend Jennifer Sheahan. We had two Facebook episodes. They’re two of the most highly listened to episodes that I’ve put on Internet Marketing Speed, so there’s obviously a big requirement for us to understand Facebook as part of our marketing. It’s covered in my Own The Race Course training and in my Traffic Grab training and it’s something that I think should be a cornerstone traffic source for most businesses. So, what I’m really interested in is for us to talk about what’s new, what’s interesting with Facebook and also, I’d love you to tell our listeners what you’ve been doing behind the scenes on my own fan page. I’m happy to share some of that information because we’ve already been getting results from the work that we just did like almost instantly. So, tell me what’s going on with Facebook.

Facebook as an essential marketing toolVictoria: Okay. Well, like you mentioned, Facebook is an absolutely essential tool for online business now. It’s not one of those things you can just have off on the side and pay attention to every now and again. You do need to have a presence there and you do need to be working it if you want to get some great value, leads and engagement. So, I guess from my perspective, I recommend that people use Facebook as a way to stay connected to their current community or list or buyers or potential customers, but also, it’s a great way to build your list and build your community even further. More so than just an email list as we know that with over a billion people globally on Facebook, the scale is there.

So, when people talk about, you know, doing other forms of social media, it’s all valuable but I say “why not put your effort into where the people are?” and we know that the people are on Facebook. And I can guarantee that most of your listeners, customers or clients are on Facebook, so that’s why I think you should definitely be there and have a presence. But it’s very easy to say that it’s more important to get very specific about what you need to do to bring in the results.

Now, most people I know who try Facebook on their own aren’t seeing the results that they were hoping for. It’s a very slow process and they get really disappointed and kind of drop it very quickly. That’s why I kind of try and give out as much advice as I can about using it in the right way and it does take time and it does take a bit of commitment as does all content creation and growing your business. But what I love about it is that it’s such a low-cost channel to be driving targeted leads to your business.

The very first thing you should be doing is having a Facebook business page. That’s not your personal page that you make friends with other people on, that’s a dedicated fan page, what used to be called a fan page now is a Facebook page for your business. So that would be the first place I’d tell people to start.

Should you have your own platform?James: I want to ask you about strategy here. Like, I’m a big believer in not creating your entire business on someone else’s platform. Now, you’ve said put energy in it but you also said to get leads for your business. Are you on the same page as me or do you have a different viewpoint that you should build your business on something you own and then use Facebook as a outpost or a signpost pointing people back to it? You know, have you seen people build everything and lose it just by having everything on Facebook and nowhere else?

Victoria: Yeah, and that’s a good point. And I always advocate that you build your online business with an email list and your own website absolutely. So, Facebook really sits alongside your website. It’s another channel and it’s another way for you to showcase your brand. It really is almost as important as your website nowadays, with the volumes of traffic that are on Facebook. Their search functionality isn’t as good, so it’s obviously not going to help you as much as your own website and there’s always the risk that you could lose your Facebook page.

It’s not overly common though, so I think there are a lot of people worried about things like that and yes it is a risk, so you want to have your own website and email list. But use Facebook as a way to drive your leads and your traffic to your offer on your website or just to your offer in general. You can still have your website and email list running in parallel. So that’s what I’d recommend. And there are ways, and this is what a lot of people aren’t doing right, is there are ways of making sure that you have your lead capture integrated with your Facebook page. So, I want people to start their own Facebook page. And it really mirrored the offers on their website.

The right approach
With applications, you can have several pages now where you can detail your offers just like you would on a website and you can have, most importantly, one page that is dedicated to giving some sort of free value where you, in exchange for an email address. That’s what I’d term your “list building opportunity”. People don’t get on Facebook looking to buy stuff straight away. They don’t have their wallets out. It’s not, you know, that kind of environment, so selling hard to people on Facebook is not the right approach. The right approach in my view is to showcase your offer clearly and simply when people land on your Facebook page, give them a sense of what you’re about and what value you can provide, direct them to your Facebook tab where they can enter their email and receive something of value for free and then keep communicating with them via the Facebook page and your email list.